Improving medical adherence and compliance is an area of interest for medical practitioners and patients alike, including in pharmacy, facility and home settings. Traditional solutions, like the various types of pill boxes and smart caps, may fail to address the root causes of medical non-adherence completely and effectively.
For instance, in an attempt to improve patient compliance, some systems may include timer-like functions or smart phone applications to remind patients when to take specific medications. However, these solutions may not effectively monitor whether the right dosage has been taken. For instance, tracking each time a bottle has been opened may not account for, for instance, how many pills are taken at a time. Furthermore, pharmacists or clinicians may not properly preprogram a patient's drug routine into a solution (e.g., in the form of programming a traditional RF tag, as an example). Such can limit accessibility of solutions to a minority of the population and may prevent proper usage for many patients and caregivers. For people taking multiple medications, there is always a possibility of mixing-up pills between reminders. For instance, a physical reminder device initially set-up to remind and track pill A may not track a second pill B if misplaced in a bottle.
Pre-sorting pill devices (e.g., pill boxes) may help manage complex medicine regimens. For instance, a user may actively prepare the medications to be taken over a coming week or even a month. However, these solutions may include significant cognitive effort, and pre-sorting the medications can be both cumbersome for the user, and prone to errors in sorting the medications correctly (i.e., the user may not correctly sort out the correct medication, in the right dosage, for the right time, all the time). Other solutions may fail to effectively remind or notify the patient when to take a certain dosage of medication.
There have also been numerous attempts to develop automatic dispensing systems. However, previous medicine-dispensing devices may fail to reliably dispense medications when needed.
Therefore, a need in the field exists for a solution that can not only dispense and remind patients when to take specific medications, but also track that the correct dosages have been taken by the patient at the correct time and ensure that the right medication is taken. A need also exists for a dispensing system to successfully determine whether there has been a mistake in the dispensing process without intervention from the patient; this need exists to increase operational reliability to extremely high levels. A further need exists for a reminder system notifying patients to bring their medications along when they leave their homes. A need also exists for a solution for the above, while still remaining accessible to an average patient (i.e., having only minimal changes to the patient's lifestyle) since some solutions rely on pharmacists or clinicians to program the device, which can limit accessibility of the solution to limited populations with access to the technology.